On Friday, while listening to the BBC Today programme reporting on the Iranian election, I had a call about the election from someone in Tehran. They could have been describing two totally different events. Getting very excited about how the election had in recent days come alive, the BBC portrayed it as a democratic battle between the hard-line reactionary Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the "moderate reformist" Hossein Mousavi, supported by all those idealistic young Iranians who want to put an end to poverty and see their country opening up to the West. The reality is that this was a completely sham battle between rival factions of a regime as ruthless as any in the world, in which the real power is exercised by the gang of hard-line mullahs round the "Supreme Leader", Ali Khamenei. In an election riddled with fraud (six million more ballot papers were printed than there are Iranians eligible to vote), all four regime-approved candidates had long been personally involved in the regime's murderous reign of terror. The final "choice" seemed to be between the regime's favoured man Ahmadinejad, formerly head of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran's KGB, who believes it is vital for Iran to export terrorism across the world, and Mousavi, once responsible for ordering the execution of 30,000 Iraqi prisoners, who equally believed in Iran exporting terrorism across the world. My caller from Tehran said those Western-minded young students were doing all they could to boycott what they saw as a loathsome charade – though none of these finer details seemed to penetrate the hermetically sealed minds of the BBC.Iranian elections a 'loathsome charade'
The reality is that Iran's election was a sham battle between rival factions of a regime as ruthless as any in the world, in which the real power is exercised by the gang of hard-line mullahs, says Christopher Booker.
Sunday, 14 June 2009
Posts
